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Long Term Support (LTS) releases of CiviCRM are versions that are maintained for use by organizations for multi-year periods of time. The first official version of CiviCRM released as a LTS was version 4.4 and announced in October of 2014. 4.4 was the official LTS version until CiviCRM 4.7 was released, at which point version 4.6 was officially designated as the new LTS.

Today, Skvare has released a new version of CiviCRM Entity, 2.0-beta11. This release contains a new feature, an admin configuration page which allows site administrators to disable exposure of entity types to Drupal.

If you are a Drupal developer coming new to CiviCRM, it can be a bit of a "culture shock" to realize that CiviCRM is not your typical Drupal module.

CiviCRM has a separate and independent evolution and ecosystem, and its standard practices and APIs reflect that. From installation of the module itself, to creating customizations and modifications of its standard behavior, you are entering into a different "world" when you implement and develop client solutions with CiviCRM.

There are two powerful modules used in the Drupal world for creating fast custom searches. Search API is a framework which provides an interface for site builders to create custom searches on any entity known to Drupal. It supports several search backends, including Apache Solr and native database search. It has a flexible API so developers can easily extend, customize, and alter aspects of the search process.

It's becoming a common request from our clients to find user-friendly ways to integrate CiviCRM data with the rest of their Drupal website functionality. Oftentimes content creators without direct user access to CiviCRM need to do simple things, such as create, update, and delete contacts in simple, specific ways.

CiviCRM Entity is a Drupal module which greatly enhances CiviCRM integration with Drupal. This module exposes many CiviCRM entities as true Drupal entities. That means that almost any module can use Drupal entities. As a result, these modules can access and manipulate CiviCRM data directly from within Drupal via Drupal’s Entity API.

Example Use Case

This example is a one event page which has tabs of many types of content and views attached which allows a anonymous user to view the info, see registered participants, register for the CiviCRM event via one webform which also automatically creates a contact, membership, active drupal user, and participant event registration to the event, logs in the user, and sets his user entered password via text field on the webform. Skvare has developed similar solutions for clients using these methods.